Lately I’ve been feeling a bit uninspired. I have a desire to create and experience and formulate, but when I go to start it, it never pans out. My ideas flower and then slowly wilt with a lack of water and air.

I am feeling a sense of entrapment — like I am owned by my insecurities. Things that would have once never bubbled to the surface are boiling over. Emotions, thoughts, fears, a sense of frustration for not having my “shit sorted.”

I have always told myself to work harder, try better, fail better — that it just isn’t enough. I have grown up into a woman that lacks a sense of acknowledgement for herself.

In lieu of the recent political uproar that is the United States, I feel a surge of desire to share my thoughts with you. To dig for a glimmer of feminist hope in, let’s face it, a very uncertain climate.

I think generations of women before me have struggled with the problem of acknowledgement. The thought that what they are doing is ok, but that they could always be doing more.

That, and the idea that they need acknowledgement from someone else. They crave someone to tell them they are proud of them, that they have accomplished something. To congratulate and shower them with positive affirmations and reassurance.

When does one stop thinking this way and finally realize that they are the only person that they need acknowledgement from? When does it become less about other people and more about what is inside you?

Over the last 5 years I have experienced, questioned, lived, challenged, and shattered my fears time and time again. I have packed up my life five separate times and openly accepted the challenge of the unknown.

I have traveled, felt weak, felt unstoppable, felt a sense of the most joy I have ever felt before. I have felt alone, felt strange, felt depressed, uninspired.

I have met some incredible people whose sense of adventure and purpose has turned a light on inside me. I have said goodbye more times than I would like to remember, smiled at strangers all over the world, and connected with people that will certainly be a part of my life forever.

When I first started writing this, I had the intention to write about the women in my life that I feel so privileged to know. Women that continue to amaze me every time I hear from them. Women that are living with such purpose and fearless grace that I find it often overwhelming to think about.

I look at what they are doing and what they have accomplished and am in utter disbelief of how amazing they really are. I feel as though these women know who they are, but I certainly don’t tell them enough.

What writing this is now bringing to the forefront though, is my undeniable requirement to think the same for myself. These women are my best friends — people that after years of friendships that may have already run their course, will remain. There is something to be said for that.

And it is only now through this personal reflection of my own insecurities that I come to realize it. I, too, am one of these women. I, too would be considered as a woman who lives her life with purpose and fearlessness.

Who strives to live. To wander, to experience, to feel the lowest low in the farthest country she can think of, and the highest high in another foreign place.

I am a woman who lives purposefully with abandonment of fear and dives into the next chapter with strength and perseverance. I chose to do that. I actively sought out these changes in my life. I jumped. Nobody else did it for me.

It is time for me to stop victimizing myself — stop diminishing my “faults” because they aren’t what I think I should be doing. Because I don’t have thousands of dollars in my bank account, or an assurance of where I will be this time in a year from now.

But one thing I know for certain, is that I will be doing something amazing. Just like I have been every year I look back on at this time.

I will stop punishing myself. I will stop comparing myself. I will start acknowledging, positively reinforcing, and applauding my successes — not sashaying them to the side.

Living with a chronic illness like Hidradenitis Suppurativa alone can be bad for your mental health. You owe it to yourself to find a significant other who wants to be there for you through good times and bad.